Published November 14th, 2003

Earlier today I started on a tool to monitor the schools 100 odd printers. They want to keep track of toner ussage and maintance on all the printers. After some hacking around with the Printer MIB RFC I was able to get the toner levels from all the HP printers on campus. I still haven’t got the Lexmarks reporting properly.

Now, I think its totaly cool to have all the Info that SNMP can provide. For example I use it with MRTG for the box in my dorm room. But SNMP sucks. Seriously. OIDs seem like a good idea at first, and its cool that companies can easily extend them, but god damn they are a PITA to work with.

Hey, but my PHP based printer monitor should be cool once its all done :)


Written by Paul Querna, CTO @ ScaleFT. @pquerna